The Practicality of Virtual Reality Applications in Education: Limitations and Recommendations

The use of virtual reality applications has grown tremendously in recent years. Virtual reality applications in the education domain have many benefits: they engage students, arouse students' curiosity, ease the communication of information, and motivate the students to improve their learning and performance. Despite literature showing that there has been a clear development in the education domain that shows improvement in students' learning skills, its application in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is limited to certain courses and fields. Furthermore, there has also been under-utilization and misutilization of virtual reality applications. Thus, the primary research question in this paper would be what the issues of the practicality of virtual reality applications for HEIs are. This paper aims to look at practicality issues to understand why VR is underutilized, particularly in HEIs. A review of the literature based on seventeen papers published between 2010 and 2020 taken from databases such as Science Direct, Ebscohost, and Scopus has found that despite the positive continuous intention to use VR applications, there are many issues regarding their practicality, such as the affordability of VR application tools, the technology-savviness of instructors, as well as the sustainability of VR use. This paper is significant as it explored and identified the practical issues of why VR applications are underused and provides practical suggestions to overcome these issues of practicality. It is hoped that HEIs would not allow these limitations to hinder the use of VR applications so that the students of this era, who are digital natives, would learn and perform better with VR applications; thus, making the use of VR applications in HEIs more widespread

A cross layer opportunistic routing protocol for wireless sensor network : analysis, modelling and quality of service support : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Network Engineering at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

A wireless sensor network (WSN) provides a platform for embedded sensing and ubiquitous computing. For ad hoc WSNs, multi-hop routing has been adopted in order to save communication power consumption. By acknowledging the lossy characteristics of radio channels on low-power WSNs, the Opportunistic Routing (OR) protocol provides an efficient method for exploiting the spatial and temporal characteristics of these wireless networks by considering multiple forwarding relays for each transmission. The main contribution of this thesis is to provide analysis and modelling for variants of the OR protocol for WSNs. Firstly, based on the basic concepts that underpin OR, we propose a new variant of OR that can be used in WSNs. It is known that communication in WSN is the most power consuming operation; hence, we propose a variant of OR that specifically reduces the total number of transmissions required during the coordination step used in OR. We investigate the effectiveness of this approach and compare it with OR that adopts existing and common candidate coordination schemes. In addition, we also propose a retransmission scheme based on provisional reliability constraints for local loss recovery that can be used in this new variant of OR. Secondly, we propose a comprehensive new analytical framework that is based on Markov Chain and Queueing theories that takes into account the key component strategies of OR (prioritization, selection and coordination) as well as the communication components of WSN. The proposed framework can be used to model the end-to-end reliability and delay performances of WSNs using OR. Thirdly, taking into account the potential deficiencies of OR due to its static coordination scheme, we introduce a variant of OR that is aware of the online quality of its selected forwarding relays that we have named as the Adaptive Coordination Opportunistic Routing (ACOR) protocol. We propose a new local metric to be known as the Opportunistic Quality Score for ACOR to improve the performance of WSNs and, in particular, to support Quality of Service delivery of messages in these networks. In addition, we provide an analytical framework for ACOR that incorporates the adaptive coordination scheme that has been developed

The Current Perceptions About Instructional Tools in Educational Towards Adoption of Virtual Reality Among Undergraduate Students

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a major tool in this field of research and education development. However, many challenges arise for students during the course of instruction and learning. The learning process, the placement of support assessment variables, and the behavioral intention to continue using it within the learning spectrum are crucial to the success of virtual reality in the educational sector. The goals of this study are to inquire into the degree to which VR is now being utilized in the field of education. In addition, Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data since it provided an applicable approach to use across the interviews, many methods combined into this study. The study polled 32 teachers and analyzed the results with advanced analysist tools. All of the proposed points were determined using the data analysis. &nbsp

I-PRESENT TM: An Involutive Lightweight Block Cipher

This paper proposes a new involutive light-weight block cipher for resource-constraint environments called I-PRESENT TM. The design is based on the Present block cipher which is included in the ISO/IEC 29192 standard on lightweight cryptography. The advantage of I-PRESENT TM is that the cipher is involutive such that the encryption circuit is identical to decryption. This is an advantage for environments which require the implementation of both circuits. The area requirement of I-PRESENT TM compares reasonably well with other similar ciphers such as PRINCE

A review: Towards practical attack taxonomy for industrial control systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is the underlying control system of most national critical infrastructures such as power, energy, water, transportation and telecommunication. In order to understand the potential threats to these infrastructures and the mechanisms to protect them, different types of cyber-attacks applicable to these infrastructures need to be identified. Therefore, there is a significant need to have a comprehensive understanding of various types of cyber-attacks and its classification associated with both Opera-tion Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT). This paper presents a comprehensive review of existing cyber-attack taxonomies available in the literature and evaluates these taxonomies based on defined criteria

Conceptualization of a Collaborative Decision Making for Flood Disaster Management

Flooding is the utmost major natural hazard in Malaysia in terms of populations affected, frequency, area extent, flood duration and social economic damage. The recent flood devastation towards the end of 2014 witnessed almost 250,000 people being displaced from eight states in Peninsular Malaysia. The affected victims required evacuation within a short period of time to the designated evacuation centres. An effective and efficient flood disaster management would assure non-futile efforts for life-saving. Effective flood disaster management requires collective and cooperative emergency teamwork from various government agencies. Intergovernmental collaborations among government agencies at different levels have become part of flood disaster management due to the need for sharing resources and coordinating efforts. Collaborative decision making during disaster is an integral element in providing prompt and effective response for evacuating the victims